PowerLine has encapsulated most of what struck me as wrong about the President’s oral epistle to the “Moslem world”. What was right can be summed up as, it could have been worse. When an American President gets merit badges for denouncing Holocaust denial and tepidly praising democracy, it’s obvious that he’s being graded on a very lenient curve.
One could, however, brush aside a great deal of discomfort about the speech’s content if it were likely to be successful as salesmanship. The objective, everyone agrees, was not to present an historically accurate picture of relations between America and the religion of Mohammed. It was to dissuade Moslems, as individuals and as states, from allying themselves with our enemies. We won’t know for months, if not years, whether this effort and its follow-ups (for a single speech, even delivered with the tongues of angels, cannot change the minds of millions of people) will be successful. President Obama’s admirers are already certain that it will be. Unfortunately, their confidence rests on weak foundations.
Viewed as salesmanship, particularly as salesmanship aimed at building long-term customer satisfaction, the speech had, I think, two flaws. The first was that it gave its audience no especial reason to prefer the United States to Iran, al-Qa’eda and other hostile groups and powers. The President’s messages were that we Americans are “mostly harmless”, that we have foolishly antagonized Moslems in the past, and that his Administration will rectify our faults. Thus, for instance, he asserted (a complete falsehood) that American laws restrict Moslems’ ability to carry out their charitable obligations and promised to undo those discriminatory measures. Similarly, he put much of the blame for Moslem underdevelopment on Western colonialism (amazingly, as the never colonized Ottoman and Persian Empires lagged even more than those areas, like Egypt, that fell under Western rule), declared that his Presidential duties include refuting slanders against Islam, and repeatedly intoned Moslem verbal formulas (“peace be upon them”, “Holy Koran”).
What this display of panderism did not do was tell a rank-and-file Moslem – with no favorable predisposition toward democracy, religious toleration, women’s rights or empathy with Jewish tribulations – why America is right and al-Qa’eda, Palestinian extremists and Iranian mullahs are wrong. Reassurances that our country bears no ill will toward Islam, even if believed, don’t refute our enemies’ claim to be restoring the dar-al-Islam to its rightful position of world leadership. Indeed, a mufsidun has two obvious lines of response:
The President’s evidence is ambiguous. He says that America has no quarrel with Islam yet admits that we discriminate against Islamic charities. He cites a conciliatory statement by President John Adams yet ignores the fact that Adams’ successor sent military expeditions against the Moslem states of the Barbary Coast, and he calls the American campaign in Iraq a “war of choice” (tantamount to labeling it unjustified aggression). He makes capital of Americans’ willingness to vote for Barack Hussein Obama, yet anyone who paid attention to the election knows that the utterance of candidate Obama’s middle name, or any reference to his tenuous Moslem background, was then stigmatized as defamation.
But supposing that the case were stronger, all that it would prove is that the U.S. is prepared to acquiesce in a great expansion of Islamic political activity. The President pleaded for the acceptance of Western values but without suggesting that their rejection would have any dire consequences. In essence, he declared America to be a “weak horse” and urged everyone to admire the grace of its carriage and the beauty of its coat. In no way did he imply that one cannot simultaneously follow the “strong horse”.
The second flaw, complementary to the first, is that the President made a number of promises, explicit or implied, about our country’s future conduct, some of which will be either difficult or unwise to keep. He repeated his pledge to shutter the Guantanamo Bay terrorist prison by next January; will he be able to overcome domestic opposition and the intractable difficulties of relocating the terrorists? (Palau won’t take them all.) He treated the timetable for withdrawal from Iraq as a hard-and-fast imperative and renounced all interest in permanent bases there; what if events don’t cooperate? He committed the U.S. to opposing Israeli settlements on the West Bank, another stance unpopular with his fellow citizens. He said that we will not give tacit approval to Israeli actions that we won’t back publicly; that is dream world diplomacy.
In short, our enemies will be able, within a few months, to pick through the Cairo oration and inveigh against a slew of discrepancies between words and deeds. If the President were selling a pair of shoes that couldn’t be returned, that would be fine. If he’s trying to sell a long-term change in international relationships, it isn’t.
As is often not noted, the soft-and-fuzzy, “we respect our Moslem brothers and sisters” approach to influencing Islamic public opinion was the persistent strategy of the Bush Administration. President Bush himself praised the “religion of peace” and invited Moslem leaders to the White House. Our government engaged in constant outreach to Moslem organizations. We flooded the Middle East with pamphlets touting the freedom that Moslems in America have to worship and proselytize. We raised no objection when the new constitutions of Iraq and Afghanistan enshrined shari’ah as the source of legislation. We did nothing to protect beleaguered Christians from Moslem persecution. Did all of those emollients, adding up to much more than one speech, accomplish anything worthwhile?
Only believers in the irresistible charisma of Barack Hussein Obama can imagine that what failed for the past seven years will work now. Notwithstanding Newsweek editors, he isn’t “sort of God”. Nor is Islamic dislike of the West a superficial reaction to George W. Bush, the war in Iraq or the establishment of the State of Israel. We patronize and misunderstand Moslems if we presume to dispel centuries of deep-seated hostility by spattering them with the milk of human kindness.
What is needed, if we are to avoid a perpetual brushfire war with Islam, is an appeal not to Moslems’ sentiments but to their interests. The good will of the United States is worth a lot more than the good will of the mufsidun. Moreover, it’s not difficult to gain. If Moslem governments recognized Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state on the tiny sliver of land that it occupies, granted Christians and Jews a substantial fraction of the religious freedom that we grant Moslems as a matter of course, stopped subsidizing anti-Western agitation, and refrained from giving material or moral assistance to terrorists, their relations with America would zoom upward, without a great deal of sacrifice on their part. Wouldn’t a candid talk along those lines be a better use of the President’s charm than a round of useless pandering?
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